Random Thoughts
The 27th Amendment -- Part 2
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October 26, 2018
As we noted last week, ten amendments were added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791. These additional provisions put limits on what the national government could do. For example, the first amendment prohibited the government from establishing a national religion like England had.
Over the years we have amended the Constitution 17 more times. Two of those amendments canceled each other out. The 18th made alcoholic beverages illegal and the 21st made them legal again.
Consequently, we have made only 15 changes to the Constitution in the last 227 years that are still in effect. Among the amendments that we have added since 1791 are those that outlawed slavery, granted women and 18 year-olds the right to vote, and provided that U.S. senators would be elected by the voters rather than by state legislators.
The 27th amendment provides that if Congress wants to raise its own salary, the new amount doesn’t go into effect until another general election takes place. Thus, if voters are opposed to the salary increase they can vote out the members of Congress who voted for it before those members can benefit from it.
I believe that most people would agree that this last amendment is wise. Public officials should not be allowed to raise their salaries after they have been elected to a position. The most interesting thing about the 27th amendment, however, is the story of its ratification.
Last week we noted that when the first Congress convened in 1789, it approved 12 proposed amendments, 10 of which were ratified by the states. One of the two that wasn’t ratified eventually became the 27th amendment.
If the members of Congress should propose an amendment today, they would provide a deadline by which the amendment would be ratified or not. But no such deadline was added to the 12 proposed amendments in 1789.
Consequently, the amendment was resurrected in the early 1980s and additional states ratified it. It became part of the Constitution in 1992 – over 200 years after its fellow proposals had been added!
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